Thomas Burnett, Jr. Source: The University of Minnesota

In addition to the 4.2 million square feet of retail shops, restaurants, theme park rides, aquarium and other attractions, you will find a plaque dedicated to a Minnesotan who lived for only 38 years but left an enduring legacy of courage and hope.

His name is Thomas Edward Burnett, Jr. He was born on May 29, 1963. He died on September 11, 2001.

As a high school quarterback in Bloomington, Minn., Tom led his over-achieving team to the state championship game. He would go on to graduate from the University of Minnesota in 1985 with a degree in finance from the Carlson School of Management, and later earn his MBA from Pepperdine University in California.

It was on the West Coast that he achieved his dream. He became senior vice president and chief operating officer of Thoratec Corp., a successful medical device company that made heart-assist pumps.

But he was equally proud of his successes at home. He married his wife Deena after three years of dating, and the couple would go on to have three daughters – Madison, Halley and Anna Clare.

Their lives changed forever on Sept. 11, 2001, when Tom became a passenger of United Airlines Flight 93, one of four American airliners that would be hijacked that day by extremist Islamic terrorists.

While we don’t know all the details of what transpired on Flight 93, we do know this: Tom was one of three men who organized the passengers and led a revolt against their attackers.

“We’re all going to die,” Tom told his wife Deena during his last phone call home, “but three of us are going to do something. I love you, honey.”

Those would be the last words that Deena would hear from her husband, who died, along with everyone else aboard the airplane, as he stormed the cockpit cabin in a show of defiance against terrorism. Flight 93 crashed into a field in western Pennsylvania, hundreds of miles from the hijackers’ intended target in Washington, D.C.

Tom’s heroism is memorialized in several locations around America, but none are more appropriate than the open-door memorial at the Mall of America in Bloomington. On it are inscribed these words: “The open door in this piece reflects the cockpit door of Flight 93. It also represents a door to a brighter, safer place. Never forget the victims of 9/11 and walk confidently toward the future intent on ‘doing something’ … something good, something kind, something noble, and something right.”

A plaque at the memorial dedicated to Tom says, simply: “Do Something.”

One of those who have “done something” is Tom’s widow, Deena Burnett. In 2006, she and co-author Anthony Giombetti released a book titled Fighting Back: Living Life Beyond Ourselves. The story recounts the heroism of her late husband and his fellow passengers. It also details the trouble she and other relatives of Flight 93 victims had in getting the FBI to release cockpit voice recorder tapes to the public.

Mac Conway presents the 2002 Conway Safe Skies Award to Deena Burnett, who accepted it on behalf of all passengers and crew of United's Flight 93.

If the name Deena Burnett seems familiar to you, it’s probably because you remember seeing her and listening to her speak at the very first IAMC Professional Forum, in Savannah, Ga., on Oct. 29, 2002.

In an emotional ceremony that no one who attended will ever forget, IAMC founder H. McKinley “Mac” Conway presented the Conway Safe Skies Award to the 40 people aboard Flight 93 who fought back. Accepting the award on behalf of the passengers and crew were Deena Burnett and Sandy Dahl, widow of Flight 93 pilot Jason Dahl.

“All of the people on board that plane taught us a very valuable lesson,” said McKinley Conway. “And that lesson is that the answer to terrorism is to fight back – whenever, wherever and whatever the cost.”

Deena’s remarks that day were brief but powerful. “Each person on that plane had a task to perform, and they performed it admirably,” she said. “The result of their heroic actions is that our government buildings in Washington, D.C., are still standing.”

If you’d like to pay your respects to the memory of Tom, and every other passenger of Flight 93, go to the west side of the first floor of Mall of America, next to the fountain in front of Nordstrom.

There you will find the open-door memorial for the bravery of United Airlines Flight 93, as well as the simple challenge inscribed on it: “Do Something.”